Sky was clear, and decided to take the opportunity to look through an eyepiece again.. first time in a long time (since the last starparty at Kulnura). Been sick, it's been cold, and haven't felt like going out much, but last night I had to break the drought.
I didn't plan it to be a long and indepth session, just wanted to get some time in before Las Vegas, Lost and Amazing Race were on TV
No EQ platform
No DSC's
No charts
No chair
No dark adaptation
1 eyepiece (Meade S4000 UWA 14mm) giving me ~90x
However I did leave my scope out for 2 hours before to cool down
Spent about 40 minutes under the stars, transparency was quite good, could make out the milkyway clouds around sagittarius quite easily. Seeing wasn't bad, i'd give it 6/10.
Due to the lack of planning and tools at my disposal, I went for the old favourites and easily observed objects that I could find and observe from my backyard with little to no dark adaptation.
Objects observed included;
- M4 (globular near antares) - Nice, small globular. Resolved to most of the core. In the 14mm UWA it only took up about 1/4 - 1/5 of the field
- M6 (Butterfly cluster) - Framed nicely in the 14mm, but magnification too high to easily identify the butterfly shape
- M7 (ptolemy's cluster) - Nice grouping of stars, no real shape to them. Almost filled the FOV of the 14mm
- M8 (Lagoon Neb) - Could really have used a neb filter, quite washed out due to the skies and my eyes not being dark adapted. The darker lane was evident.
- M20 (trifid) - similar to M8, the 3 dark spokes were visible but they didn't stand out. I made out 3 of the stars in HN40
- M22 (globular in sag) - Very nice, not too dissimiliar to the view I had of M4. It seemed a little larger, with more stars.
- M16 (eagle nebula) - I couldn't make out any nebulosity, but the cluster itself was nice
- M17 (swan/omega nebula) - Quite bright compared to the other nebulas I viewed, stoof out nicely against the background sky
- Alpha Centauri (double) - Well, John B might have a go at me if I didn't observe at least one double
- NGC4755 (jewelbox) - Brilliant open cluster, one of my all time favourites. Framed very nicely in the 14mm UWA.
- EB365 (carbon star near Beta Crux) - red, small, nice
- Jupiter - wasn't expecting to be able to see it, as it was too low in the west behind the trees in my backyard, but a hole in the canopy let me see the GRS rising and Ganymede kissing the edge of the disc as it was about to transit. Nice view. A satellite also streaked through the FOV as I was looking at it, which was quite a surprise
So there you go, nice to get some eyepiece time again, albeit brief and unplanned. But it's rekindled the fire.
Thanks for reading.
